A fairly obvious problem with the idea is that energy is really quite ubiquitous, especially if you are looking outside IC2 or at long term players. Servers would have to actively restrict production to make it a valuable asset.
For items it's not as bad, but still mods aren't nowhere near the large MMOs in terms of how many items can be acquired and the difficulty of doing so. Things like rare drops are scaling by building some automation to get them, e.g. mob farms, not by play time. Even if there were such drops, MC's progression is way to shallow, there's not nearly enough difficult scenarios that warrant much better equipment. Trading commodity type items will probably just shorten the game for players starting later.
This being said, I don't think the idea has sufficient application potential without increasing the game's depth first. For the few things worth trading the basic Forestry post box system or Trade-O-Mats are IMO enough.